Melungeon Majority

JSmith

Banned
Under what circumstances could the so called Melungeons- form a majority of the people in the areas of the South they lived in ?- with the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melungeon

http://abagond.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/melungeons
Melungeons

Thu 24 May 2012 by abagond






The Melungeons (1600s- ) are a mixed-race people in America who live in the Appalachian mountains where Tennessee meets Virginia meets Kentucky. There are about 50,000 of them. They look mainly white nowadays but in the 1690s French traders said they looked like Moors (the Berbers of north-west Africa). They looked neither white nor black nor American Indian.
The Melungeons said they were Portuguese, that they had been living in those mountains since before the white man came. This has led some to suppose that they came from Portuguese shipwrecks who mixed with American Indians. Some have even said they came from Carthaginian shipwrecks thousands of years ago.
It all sounds cool and gives them an air of mystery, but the truth about them was there all along in court and census records – and, of course, in their DNA.
They are part Portuguese and Spanish, but that comes not from shipwrecks but those who worked in the slave trade in the 1600s. They are part American Indian, Cherokee mainly, but not all that much and mostly from the 1800s.
The Melungeons mainly come from free black men in Virginia who took white wives in the 1600s. In the late 1600s and early 1700s they moved westward into the mountains – just about the time the colour line was hardening in Virginia.
Multiracial communities: Even as racism deepened in mainstream American society there were at the edges people like the Melungeons in Tennessee, the Creoles of New Orleans, the Seminoles in Florida and the Brass Ankles in South Carolina, where the races mixed more freely and were not so unequal. The level of segregation seen in America even today in our supposedly enlightened times is not “natural” but a creation of white racism.
The white club: In the 1800s as whites moved into the region, they did not quite know what to make of the Melungeons. They were suspected of being part black but because they acted as if they were white – they owned property (even slaves), voted, served in the militia, went to white churches, were culturally white and denied any possible blackness – they were regarded as pretty much white or something close to it. “Portuguese” was just about right for the Anglo colour scale of the day.
Not that they did not experience prejudice – the name “Melungeon” itself was a put-down till the 1960s – but it was nothing like what blacks experienced, who were denied even basic human rights.
On census records the Melungeons first appear mainly as mulattoes or free people of colour. As the 1800s wore on they were increasingly counted as white – in part because they were becoming physically whiter from marrying white. “Mulatto” back then, by the way, did not necessarily mean half-white and half-black, like it does now, but anyone who was mixed-race, even those who were not part black.
Common Melungeon family names: Bunch, Collins, Goins, Gibson, Minor, Williams, Breedlove, Mullins, Denham, Bowling, Moore, Shumake, Bolton, Perkins, Morning, Menley, Hopkins, Mallet.
 
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Prevent the Trail of Tears, and have some sort of free State of Franklin, composed of eastern Tennessee and Appalachia? That would give you more Native Americans in the region, along with allowing more opportunity for interracial mixing by removing slavery. I'm still not sure you can get them to be a minority, but that will boost their numbers significantly.
 
Prevent the Trail of Tears, and have some sort of free State of Franklin, composed of eastern Tennessee and Appalachia? That would give you more Native Americans in the region, along with allowing more opportunity for interracial mixing by removing slavery. I'm still not sure you can get them to be a minority, but that will boost their numbers significantly.

As somebody with some veeeeery distant ancestry in this group (at least, apocryphally and according to grandparents mine who hail from Grafton), I'd be interested in something like that happening. The term "melungeon" is itself attributed to the Cumberland Gap folks, but such an ethnic mix existed by other names both pejorative and neutral (e.g. call someone "Guinea", and you'd be picking one's teeth off the ground) within the Appalachia area.

That being said, I think you'd need the societal "fabric" of the region to be rather different than OTL's rigidness in racial categories to keep such a group distinctive enough to be noticed and acknowledged on a large scale.
 

JSmith

Banned
That being said, I think you'd need the societal "fabric" of the region to be rather different than OTL's rigidness in racial categories to keep such a group distinctive enough to be noticed and acknowledged on a large scale.
Right. So North America doesn't have a one drop rule somehow?
 
I'm rather interested in this tale. I've never really come across it in such detail before and only know of them from a passing mention in one of Bill Brysons Travel book. They certainly have some very stout English sounding sir names and I think one theory that Bill Bryson mentioned was they could have been the descendants of the survivors of the Lost colony of Roanoke.
 
Getting back to the OP, I direct y'all to THIS thread for discussions on a more "mixed" South, which could well result in a *Melungeon majority in large parts of the region. I would draw special attention to the point Sevarics makes about the landgraves and cassiques in OTL's Carolinas, which could result in extension of the franchise for non-whites. Hell, one wouldn't even need a monarchy for that to stick, as the Netherlands proved that a nobility system can work in a republican government. Of course, while that helps in terms of retaining a USA analogue, it does introduce a TONNE of butterflies.
 
It's always an idea to have them adopt a particular religious denomination that strongly encourages having lots and lots of children. In the past, many people had lots of children, but in the Western world, birthrates have of course dropped. If a religious tenet mandating lots of procreation is adopted early enough, and remains in force up to the present among the Melungeons, that will lead to there being more of them, obviously.
 
It's always an idea to have them adopt a particular religious denomination that strongly encourages having lots and lots of children. In the past, many people had lots of children, but in the Western world, birthrates have of course dropped. If a religious tenet mandating lots of procreation is adopted early enough, and remains in force up to the present among the Melungeons, that will lead to there being more of them, obviously.

Mormonism would do it had the faith not developed racial overtones for much of its history.
 
Weren't Blacks considered stained their color for the sins of the ancestors and barred from the Mormon priesthood of believers until the 70's? How would the Melungeons fit into this then?
 
Weren't Blacks considered stained their color for the sins of the ancestors and barred from the Mormon priesthood of believers until the 70's? How would the Melungeons fit into this then?

Hence my caveat when I brought up Mormonism. However, I don't know when racism seeped into the LDS movement.
 
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